Joni Adamson - Beyond Climate Fiction: Visionary Fictions, Futures Thinking, and a Cosmovisionary Archive

In Fall of 2024, the United Nations hosted hundreds of global delegates at The Summit of the Future, a monumental effort to forge a new international consensus on how to safeguard the future. For the first time, humanists, including me, were an officially-invited part of the delegation, and at the table for consideration of UN Secretary-General António Guterres’ challenge to take specific steps to “make a tangible difference in people’s lives and account for the livlihoods and resilience of future generations.”

In this lecture, I will explain the role of climate fiction in the lead-up to my invitation (as a humanist) to come to the United Nations. Then, I’ll dive into a discussion of Day After Tomorrow (2004), the most celebrated “cli-fi” film to date, and bring Solar Storms (1994), an indigenous-authored novel that has only recently been considered part of an emerging climate fiction canon into the discussion. I connect these two seemingly unrelated pieces because they can both be connected in interesting ways to the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), the massive Atlantic Ocean current system which affects climate, sea levels and global weather system.

My discussion explores how both film and novel create characters that draw attention to the value of “futures thinking,” a practice foregrounded at the Summit of the Future and, for over 20 years, by environmental humanists interested in impowering individuals, students, governments, societies, and organizations to imagine and shape alternative, desirable futures, particularly in the face of accelerating ecosystemic disruptions associated with climate change (like AMOC). With Solar Storms as an example not of “cli-fi” per se, but as an example of a genre Black Studies professor and spoken word artist Walida Imarisha calls ‘visionary fiction,’ I explore why we might want to go beyond futures thinking to ‘cosmos thinking,’ a concept linked to cosmovisions, cosmopolitics and the indigenous-authored Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth and Climate Change (2012).

Building on my previous work around indigenous cosmopolitics and the environmental humanities (Adamson and Davis 2017, Adamson and Monani 2016), I propose a ‘cosmovisionary archive’ that would facilitate cosmos-thinking by gathering together unruly, mixed genres (ancient oral tradition, almanacs, visionary fictions, blockbuster films) that “account for the livlihoods and resilience of future generations” and acknowledge Earth systems (like AMOC) as ‘persons’ with rights ‘to regenerate biocapacity and continue vital cycles’ (Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth and Climate Change 2012).